At one time my inbox was filled with those. Now it is just a sporadic trickle that comes in fits and starts.

I agree with everything else in your post, but to be fair to Perl 6, the specifications really should be receiving a few small updates here and there. (Concurrency and parallelism need more work of course, but besides that....) The rate of change in the Synopses doesn't concern me.

(If you meant all commits to Perl 6 projects have dropped off, then I misunderstood you.)

Hm. You seem to be right. I thought I was still getting all commits -- I certainly used to and I don;t remember stopping them -- but looking into my trash file I only have perl6/spec ones in there since I last emptied it. I'll have to take a close look through my filters and see what's what.

But the point stands. On the basis of my less and less frequent catchups on the perl6 lists, there are far fewer contributors -- casual and committers -- now than even there were a couple of years ago.

With the rise and rise of 'Social' network sites: 'Computers are making people easier to use everyday'

Examine what is said, not who speaks -- Silence betokens consent -- Love the truth but pardon error.

"Science is about questioning the status quo. Questioning authority".

In the absence of evidence, opinion is indistinguishable from prejudice.

Some years ago we used to have a central repository for nearly all Perl 6 stuff, which was the pugs svn repository.

It has been split up into several git repositories on github, and new repositories have been created.

If you want to get a feeling for the commit activity in Perl 6 land, I recommend to open an account on github and follow the perl6 organization, the rakudo user and sorear/niecza. Of course that won't give you the activity in the module repos, but it's a good start.

As for the quietness on perl6-language, that's mostly because discussions on that list haven't been very productive of late. It is filled with people who suggest major restructrings of syntax and object model in response to small problems, and who often don't have a feeling for what's there already in Perl 6, and what needs reimplementing. Taking a look at some discussion on p6l I do understand how people arrive at the conclusion that Perl 6 is vaporware -- those actually implementing stuff tend to stay away from p6l.

Thus most discussions about spec changes happens on IRC, which seems to work out much better.